Will Power's turbulent ride to the top

Admit it. When you were watching the IndyCar finale at Fontana last weekend, there was a moment when you thought Will Power was on the verge of blowing it. That he was about to make a mistake that would earn him the rare and unhappy distinction of being a four-time championship runner-up.

That moment was just after the restart. Up to that point in the evening, Power had conducted himself with Franchitti-esque patience and restraint; refusing to panic in the wake of a disastrous qualifying position, and picking his battles as he worked his way back up through the pack.

It was a strategy that served him well: by the time of the caution, he had climbed from 21st to sixth.

So on a night when nobody had dared to venture lower than the second lane, it was a surprise to see him diving right down to the edge of the apron, his car spraying a shower of dust and marbles behind it, to engage in some cut-and-thrust with Penske team-mate and title rival Helio Castroneves.

True, Castroneves had more to lose - the Brazilian's title hopes depending upon his finishing ahead of Power, so an accident that eliminated both would not be of much help to him.

But if Power took things too far and walled it all by himself, it would be a very different story. And the fact the Schmidt Peterson driver Mikhail Aleshin was watching the race from hospital after tripping over the apron and crashing heavily in practice was all the reminder anyone needed of the price that one could pay for pressing their luck.

For anyone who has followed Power's near-misses in the past, it was impossible not to tense up slightly every time the #12 Penske swung back to the bottom of the track. But he kept doing it, even after he had passed Castroneves. Indeed, having seen the Australian go past him, Castroneves tried to run the same line, but kept skittering back up towards the middle of the track.

Power went low on the banking to overtake team-mate and rival Castroneves © LAT

Later, the only thing that Power thought was unusual about running low was that nobody else was following suit.

"I thought more people would go to the bottom," he said. "It surprised me. It's [a] clear [lane]; it's clear air. You lose 30 per cent of your grip behind the wake of another car."

However Castroneves' efforts seemed to suggest that it wasn't a matter of other drivers not thinking to try the lower lane, but that they simply weren't able to.

Power reverted to a more conservative approach later in the race, but those few hair-raising laps offered a tiny window into why he's been one of IndyCar's dominant drivers for four or five years.

"Will brakes in a different place every lap," said team-mate Juan Pablo Montoya. "At my first race back at St Petersburg I was asking him about where to brake, and he was, 'uh, kind of down there somewhere'.

"I finally went to [Takuma] Sato and asked him, and he was, 'at that corner we brake at this marker, but in qualifying you can brake down to there'. And I was like, 'THANK YOU!'."

Power explains it thus: "To me the track condition changes all the time, so you don't know what you're going to get."

When attempting to dissect what a driver is doing behind the wheel there is a very real danger of entering the realm of the half-baked. But while all drivers make small adjustments for changing conditions every lap, Power has a reputation for leaning especially heavy upon instinct.

And if that's what drove him onto the low line for those few razor-edge laps, then it served him well in his finally gaining acceptance into the ranks of the champions.

Power is also known for his quirks. Again, the potential for two-cent amateur psychology is enormous, but it's safe to say that he's a different breed to most other professional drivers.

He's gloriously unfiltered, and there is an obvious contrast between the laid-back deadpan Queenslander and the highly-strung, self-confessed worrier - the guy who will make his one big mistake of the year right when he can least afford it, and who admits that he barely slept in the two weeks before Fontana this year.

In an interview with AUTOSPORT in late 2011, Penske team president Tim Cindric claimed that during Power's first years with the team, his toughest job was convincing the Australian that he wasn't driving for his career every single weekend.

Power crashed out of a dramatic season finale at Fontana in 2012 © LAT

It's tough to talk about mental frailty when you're discussing a driver who was capable of performances like Baltimore 2011, when he essentially drove a full stint of qualifying laps on what was then IndyCar's toughest street circuit, or who blitzed the field at Fontana last year, 12 months after handing the championship to Ryan Hunter-Reay at the same superspeedway with a lazy spin.

But Power himself says that the lessons learned from all of these weird contradictions, and the failures he encountered along the way, were integral in his finally being crowned champion. This year, he believes, we saw the 'real' Power.

"This is the first year I can say to myself that I'm a better driver," he said. "I felt that 2007 was the year where I was at my absolute optimum. I can really say this year I feel as though, I am just a better all-around driver, without the massive intensity.

"It's funny, you drive with very low emotion. Just kind of like a computer, you know what I mean? That's how I seem to find myself these days. I guess it just comes with age."

A relative slump in 2013, when he was fourth in the points and out of realistic contention before the final round, also played a part. Free from the mixed blessings of being in the championship hunt, Power was able to drive the last few races as if they were one-offs, unburdened by any broader repercussions for his season.

The benefits were evident in that extraordinary win at Fontana that year - not his first oval victory, but surely the most convincing - and he applied elements of what he learned to this season.

"I think the fact that I wasn't in the championship chase [in 2013] made me realise how aggressive I truly could be," he said. "And I got back to how I raced when I was young, which is attack, not be conservative. I think the three championships we lost was me being conservative in certain situations.

"And now I just feel like I've raced naturally. And it was a change, just because I was put in the position [of not having to] protect a points lead."

Sam Hornish Jr was the last Penske driver to win the title in 2006 © LAT

It's fitting that the year Power finally got a championship campaign across the line; finally gave Roger Penske an IndyCar title for the first time since 2006, was the season in which he became measurably more rounded as a driver. That's in spite of the fact that he was already very good, and also of the fact that he's 33.

He had the unfortunate honour of leading the drivers in penalties this year, with five - but he also noted publicly that it was something that he needed to address, and he ironed those low-percentage mistakes out long before the season ended. (Indeed, it was the normally solid Castroneves who incurred a penalty at Fontana).

And he ticked the final box for anyone claiming a place among IndyCar's elite. Long a force on road and street courses, he made clear strides with his oval pace in recent years, to the point that if it wasn't necessarily a strength, then it was certainly no longer a weakness. But until recently, all of his best oval performances had been on the bigger tracks. That ended with his win at the Milwaukee Mile; the most idiosyncratic oval of them all.

Lap 250 of last weekend's race was the crowning moment of a story 15 years in the making: like compatriot Mark Webber, Power does not have a long record of junior titles on his resume. The immediate aftermath on Saturday evening was one of the few occasions he was lost for words.

"To win the championship ... it's 15 years of hard work," he said. "And just to get the opportunity to drive for Penske, and having finished runner-up three times, it's such an emotional win for me.

"I was being asked a lot of questions before the race, and I just tried to keep everything out. It was kind of weird Just was two weeks of not much sleep and stress and all that sort of stuff. Keeping my wife up at night. And just when I got in that racecar, I just kept my mind on the job, focused and this is the result."

Amid the moment of his title success, Power batted away a harebrained question about what his win might do for his Formula 1 prospects, insisting that F1 'wasn't realistic' for someone over 30. But in IndyCar terms, he still has plenty of time left. And if he's just hitting his stride now, then there could be plenty more titles to come.